Tony Robbins on Overcoming Job Loss, Purposelessness & The Coming AI Disruption | 222

23:16And by the way, unfortunately, violence has always been with us and will be unless there's a consciousness change because it's one of the fastest ways to feel significant and certain and have variety. It also meets the fourth need, unfortunately, which is connection and love. Not the love part, but the connection part. Everyone needs connection and love, right? As human beings, if you're born, you know, as a doctor in your background, I know a rocket science doctor, but you also know as a medical doctor, that if children are not physically held as babies, if they're not having that kinesthetic touch, they get failure to thrive syndrome.

23:49Literally, they can die from the lack of that. So we need that connection. Now, most people had love and maybe it disappeared or it ended. And so they settled for the crumbs of connection, but they still want that. So you can get connection through, you know, having problems and sharing your problems with someone else. You're going to have that connection by, you know, prayer. You're going to have connection by going for a run and feeling connected to God or the universe. You know, you can feel that connection by buying a dog because, you know, cats leave, but dogs, you leave for two minutes. It's like you've been gone for six months.

24:19They're so happy to see you. Right. So there's many ways to get that sense of connection. By the way, have you ever seen two people fight over whose problem's bigger? I have this problem. I have this problem. They're not fighting over the problems. They're fighting over who's got a more significant problem. Mine's more significant, right? It's like when you're in a battle over who's been traveling too much. That's exactly right. So the first four needs are the needs of the personality. Everyone needs certainty. And if you have to lie to yourself, you'll do it. If you have to work 20 hours a day, you'll do it.

24:49People find a way to get certainty. Now, zero to 10, they might get five, six, seven. I don't know. And they might get it in a way that's temporary. If you take a bunch of sugar, you're going to get a nice sugar high, but it's going to drop. It doesn't last. Most people meet their needs in a way that is temporary, right? But certainty, uncertainty, those two, you can see how they feel like contrastive. Significance, I want to be the one, but then I want to be connected. So you can see the kind of conflicts that most people find in these first four. But the ultimate needs are our spiritual needs, not religious, but spiritual.

25:21And that is everything in life has to grow. Everything grows or it dies. That's not my law. It's the law of the universe. And everything in the universe, if it doesn't contribute, it's eventually eliminated, right? So we have to contribute. We have to give something. When we contribute, we have something to give. And that's when you have a spiritual high. That's when people feel fulfilled as opposed to survival. So I say this because to talk about someone losing their job or their sense of identity or their self-worth because they're not doing it through their work anymore. Or let's assume that there's no need for work.

25:52Let's take this utopian view. I would be concerned about that if I thought the only way we could meet our needs for significance and certainty would be through work. But look, we've already lived a post-work world to some extent if you go back in our history as humans, right? When you are not evaluated by your economic utility, your job, we always ask, what do you do in America, for example? But that's not what's happening then. You are evaluated by, let's say, your courage in war, by your creativity, by your wisdom, by the things that you could share, your art or your music or your ability to tell stories.

26:26So there are many ways to meet our needs. Right now, we have been driven to think of it only in one predictive way for the last couple hundred years. But we've done it before and we can do it again. But the answer to your question is, will we as a society do that quick enough? Will everybody make that happen quick enough? I'm afraid to say the answer is no, in my opinion, just because right now you have the carrot and the stick that's driving this technology, especially AI and nanotechnology right behind it and everything else. The carrot is I can make trillions of dollars, and the stick is if we don't do this, China could dominate the world.

27:00So as a result of that, almost no money is spent on safety, and there's almost no thinking about what's doing the jobs. You know right now we're already seeing high school students are having greater job employment than college students for the first time. That never happened before in modern history. And that's happening because people are leaving and those middle jobs have disappeared. Those first stage jobs have already disappeared. Are we doing anything about it? The answer right now is no. So is it concerning to me? Yes. My biggest concern is if you don't have any work, how do you find meaning?

27:30I know you can do it. There's many ways to do it. But we have to educate people and we've got to retool them. And just like talking to President Obama, there's very few people actually looking at how to retool our society. And they say, well, they'll become programmers. You know, they told people, go study code. And now, of course, as you know, with VibeCode, I was just talking to, I think, a mutual friend of ours. I think, you know, Robert Smith over at Vista. Yes. $125 billion private equity firm. I remember five years I talked to him. I said, what's the chokehold on your business? It's getting more people that can write code, right?

28:03More software engineers. Right now, they're eliminating them like crazy, right? They only need a few, some really smart ones. So again, you don't lose your job to AI. You lose your job to someone who has used AI better than you do. So I think the answer to your question is there is a way to meet all of our needs. It's going to be a call. And I think what AI is doing is it's a spiritual call. I know that's my view of it. We're going from survival values to spiritual values, from external focus to more internal focus that we're able to share and make the world better. That's the upside of this. But the transition time is going to be painful.

28:41And if you look at history, most of those transitions are a five-year period, roughly, if you look at every type of major disruption that's happened with technology in the past. I hope it's not like that. I hope we can – conversations like this, like we're having, could be stimulative and other people have them at a high level. and that people like you and I can try to create as much influence with those who have influence to make that shift. But there's no guarantee on it. And I think we have to be realistic to say there's probably going to be some disruption. Look, how many billionaires that you and I both know that are preppers right now?

29:12Yes. I mean, I know of a dozen of them that got together. I got invited to this meeting. I didn't go, but I got to hear the details of it. And it's just blowing my mind. I mean, we have mutual friends that are building places underground and giant ranches and hiring giants. For the first time. And having food stuff. It's crazy. So prepping for the future, that's not the answer. The way to prep for the future is prep society by giving the ability to have a different psychology about change and figuring out the ways in which we're going to create that transport. Tony, I love you for it. The tools that we talk about, like, taxing robots and so forth might be a part of that.

29:44I love you for this. And by the way, anybody who's not gone to Tony's Date with Destiny, which I've gone to twice, it's an extraordinary experience. And I commend it to everybody. and you'll explore these six human needs and understand which of them drive you. And I'm not questioning whether this transformation can occur. I'm concerned that who in society or what institution or what organizations or what leaders are going to lead this, because I don't see anybody in government addressing this. I see a little bit coming out of the hyperscalers,

30:24most powerful institutions on the planet, right? This magnificent seven right now has got, you know, a revenue equivalent to half the GDP of the United States and more than 99 % of the planet. So who's gonna take the lead? And, you know, what type of programs need to be in place to change this conversation at the middle school and high school level, right? Because right now, you know, with your young daughter and your older children, it was always, okay, study hard. This is important. You need to contribute to society. You need to learn. You need to do math tables. All of these things are effectively fading away and how you contribute, ultimately the conversation, we'll talk about this in a few minutes, how to use technology to upskill your purpose in life, to go for your moonshots.

31:18The analogy I like to use is, how do you create a Star Trek future versus a WALL-E or a Mad Max future? Well, I think, again, these are deep questions, but I think my hope is the Elons of the world that we've got a chance to be able to chat with and you're good friends with and some of our friends at Google and some of those very individuals you're talking about, I think the gentleman at Anthropic has even more association to some of this. It's to say, look, we have to do two things. We've got to retool people for this, but we've got to retool the psychology. And as you know, we did that study at Stanford on, you know, when in the middle of COVID, they came to me and said, you've got these unbelievable results for two of their professors who came to a date with destiny and six day program.

32:00And what do we do? We reorganized, they reorganized, I didn't tell them how, their value system. Well, when you change your value system, you change what you notice, what you appreciate. If your number one value in life is security and the bottom of your list is adventure, when you walk in that seminar room, you know where all the exits are. If your number one value is adventure, you don't even know which door you came in. You don't care, right? You literally, your predictive process, just like AI, literally is rewired in that process. So we need to teach people how to rewire themselves, and we've proven it.

32:32The Stanford study, you know, I asked them in advance. You said they want to do it on depression. And I said, you know, tell me what the meta studies show about current treatments for depression. And it blew my mind. 60 % of the people that go in for therapy or drugs or the combination thereof make zero improvement on their depression. 60%. That's the meta studies. 40 % improve, but on average, they improve half as much. They're 50 % less depressed. Now, some get well, but very few. Most stay on these drugs. And I said, man, you should be able to get that result, you know, with a placebo. And I said, so what's the best study you've ever done?

33:07It was done at Johns Hopkins about eight years ago now. for a month they gave people depressed psilocybin magic mushrooms and cognitive therapy for a month i said well that much biochemical change you must have got a change they said it was the most successful in history they got 56 of the people six weeks later had no symptoms which is pretty unbelievable compared to anything else i said i know this sounds like you know you know i'm exaggerating or you know there's ego involved i'm not we've just done this enough i know the rewiring process, we will trounce those numbers. So you set it up the same way.

33:41And when they did the study, after six weeks, 93 % of the people had no symptoms whatsoever. And the 7 % had improved, but more importantly, 17 % of the people in the study came in with suicidal ideation. When they left, none did. This is just reorganizing, retooling, right? The best part was a year later with no interaction from me, their negative emotions dropped 72 % overall, positive emotions up 51%. Now, why am I telling you that? If you have the best Ferrari in the world, let's call AI your Ferrari, right? It can empower you to do all amazing things at speed and amazing. But you've got to think about what the new environment is you're driving that Ferrari in.

34:21If you're going to the Baja race, Baja 1000, and you try to drive that beautiful Ferrari, it's going to go nowhere. If you go to the Dakar race, you know, 9 ,300 miles in the Sahara Desert, and you don't retool, you're going to die out there. And so I think we've got to retool the thinking processes, the emotions, and we've proven we can do it. So I think with people, these types of things now can be done at scale, as you know. Like I'm doing my seminar, you know, at the end of this month, I do one once a year for free for people all over the world. I've done it since COVID, right? And so we call it the Time to Rise Summit.

34:55It's time to take your life to the next level. We offer it for free. We had 1.3 million people last year join us from every country on the face of the earth. And every night we did. I didn't do it for two hours. I did it literally for three days, three and a half hours a day. And you see these huge transformations that before I can only do in an audience of 15000 people in a stadium. All that came, by the way, because when they shut down during covid, this big problem, I had to adapt because I wanted to help people. It wasn't you know, I got 114 companies, but this is my mission. And so I was like, okay, we'll move to Vegas.

35:28They shut down Vegas. We'll move to Texas. They shut down Texas. We'll do it in movie theaters. They shut down the movie theaters. So I built the studio and we started this process. And so now the seminar is no longer 15 ,000 people. A standard like, you know, Unleash the Power Within event you go to has got between 40 and 60 ,000 people because we have people at the event live and people everywhere. So everything is to your advantage if you create these psychological shifts. That's what has to happen in people. and we need some players who want to help fund that. And I'm doing it for free where I can do it as much as I can.

36:00But the tools exist. It's not like we don't know what to do to rewire people. But if we do nothing, we're going to have problems. And not everyone's going to take advantage of that no matter what you do. And you're going to have to deal with that as a society still. So first of all, we'll put the link to Time to Rise in the show notes and commend it again to everybody here. Tony, maybe the advantage is going to be AI Tony at scale. I mean, we're going to have AI delivering mass issues in this disruption. Well, not only me, but actually I'm in discussions right now with an organization that has some of the smartest AI people, I think, on the planet.

36:38And they've already got it up and running. We're doing 50 languages. We're doing counseling. And I wouldn't recommend the average therapist. I'm not being disrespectful. I wouldn't recommend the average coach. In any industry, there are people that are exquisitely good, but it's hard to get to them or their schedule is full. So we're going to make this available literally worldwide for people to help them be able to manage. They could pop on an app and make it happen. Right now, it's done for free for people. At some point, there'll be a price point that'll be reasonable. And I'm also, I was just, they just haven't announced it yet, but they just, the Federal Advisory Committee on Health and Human Services, they've had, I guess, I don't know, it was 2 ,000 people apply.

37:19I didn't apply, but there's 15 people on it and they just selected me and I'm going to be the person who's the mental health side. So it gives me a chance to really look at how I can have some influence on the governmental side to some of these tools, digital tools that can help us do that. Because I think digital tools are part of the answer because you can scale them. I think it's the only answer. It scales. When I look at your six human needs, right? Certainty and uncertainty, variety, significance, love, connection, growth, contribution. AI is hitting every one of those in a disruptive fashion, right?

37:48Just in terms of teenagers having relationships with AI girlfriends is going to disrupt, you know, normal course of social development for individuals. I mean, the level of uncertainty that's going to hit people in their jobs, level of certainty when I always know I can go get an answer and I have my AI that loves me and always answer it. You know, significance. Not only does it love you, but it always affirms you, even if you're being an idiot. And tells you, you know, your jokes are hilarious. You're so smart. That's such a great idea, right? It's crazy. It is. So, I mean, it's going to screw with our six human needs.

38:23It already is, as you said. It's more certain for me to pick up my AI and then, like, I don't know if you saw, but the latest statistics in Japan, they're talking about no one's having sex. They've moved completely out. They're burnt out by work. And then they fulfill themselves digitally in every way. They're, as you know, robots, they think have a soul. So, you know, they have a completely different frame. But, you know, I saw a statistic that blew my mind here in the United States right now. Young men, 25 to 33 years old, less than one third have ever approached a woman to ask her out for a date physically.

38:56Yeah. And that goes along with homeownership. And it's crazy. We're destroying sort of the existing social fabric in many ways. And the challenge is, I believe we're just at like the 5 % of it all. right we're i don't even i don't even know it's five you know you and i but we can't estimate something so big but i think you're right it's at the beginning of the beginning the beginning but i do i do think there's a there's a a solution that's available to us on a larger scale too if we can at a fundamental level just keep you to understand the story of their life i mean what is your life it's a story and if you think about like if you go to a movie if you read a book you know there's usually seven elements of a story there's the fundamental way you know what the story's about is the main character has a desire, a driving desire.

39:45You know, if you go back like 30 years and you look at a terrible movie that almost everybody's seen, Schwarzenegger made this movie called True Lies. And in the beginning of this movie, you see the beginning of this guy and you realize he's a spy and he's going after the bad guys. And so you know what his driving desire is, that your desire determines the story. Is your desire to become one with God? Is your desire to make a billion dollars? Is your desire to help the planet? Is your desire to save children is the right poetry. That starts your story. Then the next part of your story is you take a look at this and you start to say everybody has a problem or a need or they wouldn't be after that desire.

40:20And what you'll see often is you as the person reading or watching the story, you can see the main characters missing courage or they're not very kind or they're not telling the truth. You know, that silly example I gave of Schwarzenegger, you know, he looks like a superhero and he goes home and you realize his family doesn't even know he's a spy. He lies to everybody about everything, right? And so he doesn't have courage at home. He doesn't have honesty. He doesn't have connection. And then the next part of the story is there's opponents always. There are three opponents. There's the external opponent, like those bad guys out here, but then there's the intimate opponent.

40:54In that movie, he thinks his wife is cheating on him, and she's not, and so he has fights there. But then there's ultimately the fight within yourself, the internal opponent. And as you fight that, you usually come up with a plan to deal with these opponents, And if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans, right? You have battles. But eventually, if you keep growing those battles, you have self-revelation. You have a moment when you realize, oh, my God, it's not her. It's me. I'm not being honest. I'm not being courageous. I'm being courageous here, but not here where it matters. And that self-revelation leads to new actions, new character.

41:24And then you get to an equilibrium where life will never be the same again or, you know, happily ever after. That element of a story, if you can see where you are, where your desires are, what your current plan is, who you're battling with, that allows you to step out of reaction. But the ultimate step out is this. The oldest story of humanity, first of all, you need a really good opponent, right? If you look at, you know, Science of the Lambs and you see Tony Hopkins, Anthony Hopkins with Jodie Foster, he's so brilliant, it makes her a bigger hero, right? But the hero's journey story, it's been taught a million times.

42:02It's in every culture in the world. We all know of Joseph Campbell. But I just want to remind people, if you can think of your life in terms of the hero's journey, whatever you're dealing with, technology change, job change, career change, like everyone is going to experience what the first step is in that hero's journey. Your life seems to be okay. And then something happens and they call it the call to adventure. It doesn't feel like adventure when your house burns down. It doesn't feel like adventure and you're burglarized. It doesn't feel like adventure when you lose your job or the government shuts you down with COVID or you find yourself in a position where someone says you have a tumor.

42:37But it is the beginning of an adventure if you don't give up. And so we experience that extreme stress that people experience. We're all going to experience it. It doesn't matter how spiritual you are, how religious you are, how believer you are. It doesn't matter how rich you are. It doesn't matter how sincere you are. Everyone's going to experience it more than once. But what happens is most people try to not go on the call, like just ignore it. And it only gets worse, as you know. If you, the old phrase is, if you're going through hell, keep going. If you push through those moments, the people that do, they get three things out of it.

43:11Number one, they realize how strong they are. And all these other things you're worried about go away because you start realizing, I am so much more than I thought I was. Second, you learn who your real friends are, not your Facebook friends or whoever you call them, right? The ones that are there when it's not going well and third you get almost an immunity to future challenges I have a friend that was in Vietnam and was shot down as a pilot and spent six years in solitary confinement and Like you know, you know later on I remember the IRS was coming after him and like aren't you stressed? It's like after the North Vietnamese.

43:42Are you kidding me? You know, I'm no problem here So the first step in that journey real fast think of like Wizard of Oz Dorothy's got this black and white, nice life. It's okay. She thinks the big deal is somebody wants to take her dog from her because the dog bit somebody, right? Little Toto. And what happens? She avoids any real change. She just tries to run away. But then life comes and gets you. And when life comes to get you, it comes, you know, when you try to refuse the call, it says, no, you're going on the journey. The tornado takes her. And she finds herself in a new world where there are new people.

44:17She makes some new alliances. She meets some new mentors who are going to help guide her. And she starts to go past the threshold where she can't go back. She's on this road. She's on this new journey. And on that journey, she goes to ordeals. She has to fight the dragon, the witch in this case, the wicked witch of the east and the west. And she's going to get to the promised land where Oz is going to give her everything. And she does all these fights and she goes through all these learnings and experiences and she becomes more. And when she gets there, she finds out this guy is not the person who's going to change my life.

44:49The answer is already inside of me. The tin man discovers that he already has a heart. The straw man understands he's got a brain. Yes, there's courage. He's demonstrated. It's not that you weren't fearful. You did it anyway for the lion. And for her, it's tapping your feet and saying there's no place like home. Well, when you go through that cycle, when you slay the dragons, you become more and you have now something to give. You come home a new person. And as soon as you think it's all over, it happens again, right? So when I lost my home, you know, I've helped, well,$6 million I donated because I just, I couldn't stand the pain I saw people in LA.

45:24You know, I don't live in LA because I saw people that get a 14-day pass, right? What are they going to do without a home? So I tried to help as many people as I could. But some of the people I helped individually and some of the people I got to talk to, I was like, I lost my home 20 years ago, burned to the ground. Everything I had was gone. My family was alive. That's what mattered. Everything else was gone. There was no place to store your pictures on your history in the cloud. And I said, but what it led to was a whole new world. I met new friends. I had to move to a new place. I met new mentors.

45:52And I have a dear, dear friend that I just recently talked to who a year ago lost his home during that time. He's in the best shape he's ever been in. And he never would have made those changes without the call. So AI is the call. New technology is the call for us to become more. Again, to move from survival to spirit, to move from settling to something greater. I agree with it all. I just want to go back to one point before we leave it, which is this does not exist throughout society today. This is a small percentage of the populace that have come to your programs, have learned your teachings, as I have.

46:32I've been both, I think, a close friend and a student of yours. And I think that the only way we're able to, you know, Isaac Asimov has Isaac Asimov's foundation series. If you remember that book foretold the collapse of the empire. And the whole story is around how do we shorten the dark age? Yes. So I believe from everything I'm seeing, we're going to have a period of disruption. Is that disruption three to five years, three to eight years, three to 10 years? I don't know, but the challenge has to be how do we ameliorate the issues? How do we shorten that time? And I think this whole transformation of mindset, of purpose, of understanding this as opportunity and calling versus devastation of your career is critically important.

47:27And for whoever is listening to the podcast, I think this is important to teach your kids, for you to internalize on your own. I think those who are in heads of corporations or government leaders, this conversation, this kind of planning needs to start today because it's going to take two or three years to roll out. I think this has got to be in middle schools and high schools. I'm decimated by the fact that high schools today are avoiding the discussion or utilization of AI. This is coming, you know, the way towards my 14 year olds faster than ever before. We understand it, understand that, you know, this is a quote from a dear friend who basically said that, you know, AI is not a hand grenade.

48:19It's a jet pack. And that's how you should think about it. It's not something that's going to blow up your life. It's something that enables you at scale. So I think, Tony, the conversation is how do we do that? How do we get this deployed? I think it's certainly not just what I'm teaching. God only knows how many people that have these insights. But I think what it is is having systems of scale. And so I think the education system is a huge part of that process. And that's why I'm personally investing in several approaches where it's a different form of teaching. They're right now private groups, but, you know, looking to find that ideal formula.

48:56As you know, there's many of them where AI is a part of the process and you can accelerate massively the traditional learning, but then kids are learning to have grit. Like, well, they got five-year-olds doing, you know, a 5K on their trike and they don't think they can do it and they find out they can. Or a group of kids come together and learn how to, you know, rent and create their own Airbnb experience. You know, there are experiences of life that are coming, and there's a lot of it happening right now. But is it going to come together? Look, three to five years, probably we're going to have some very challenging times.

49:26To think that you're going to go and have every season be the same is absurd. We all think that how it is right now, if it's terrible, it's always going to be terrible. It's good. It's always going to be good. But the four seasons of life happen. And so we will go through a tough summertime, or you could call it a tough wintertime. But, you know, some people freeze to death in winter. Other people learn to ski and snowboard and build a fire and be with their family. And what I'm suggesting is our discussions and many other discussions, not just the ones we're having, hopefully will stimulate more people to say, I'm going to choose to have this be a season I love and enjoy and grow from, not one I'm fearful of.

50:00And at the same time, I know not everyone will. I'm going to do everything I can to support individuals, organizations, or tools that can help people navigate this time period. because on the other side of it, again, you'll have another springtime. You'll have a time where, you know, there's times when people are optimistic, everybody believes everything's going to go great, and it goes for a period of time. But you got to remember, human beings are cyclical just like the seasons. Our emotions are. We go 15 years, 20 years, if you study a thousand years of Roman history or 500 years of Anglo-American history, which I've done pretty deeply, you see there's a period.

50:33There's that springtime where everybody's optimistic and it's great. But eventually, if you smile constantly, your face hurts. We need variety. So then you go through, or the universe, you go through a summer that's a little tough, a little hard. And then you go to the fall where everything's easy and you reap and the economy's great. And then you go through a great winter. Life is strengthening us, testing us, and then giving us a chance to grow. Testing us and a chance to grow. That cycle is not going to go away because technology enters our world. It doesn't mean because there's no work that there won't be seasons.

51:03Those seasons are part of nature. They're part of something larger than ourselves. And so what you want to do is figure out how do you take advantage of what a season you're in, how do you help your family? And I think coming back to like developing some new habits, like, okay, getting your kids to take 10 or 15 minutes a day that was spent scrolling and they're going to learn AI, just 10, 15 minutes a day. We do courses for people like that. Or I'm going to go do something in some area. I'm going to study nanotechnology. I'm going to study my own human psychology. Taking these little micro learning moments as a new habit will change people's lives because it will get them to start recognizing patterns, using them and eventually creating their own.

51:41And when you create your own, when you become a creator, all this fear disappears. It's not that you want to have challenging times. It's just nothing sustains you more than your own capacity, your own identity that says, I find a way always to take things to the next level. And the biggest thing missing, I think for most human beings is they're looking to what they can get instead of what they can give. Every person I know, and you're one included, you talk about moonshots, right? It's like we found things we care about way more than ourselves, whether it be your kids, your family, your community.

52:12I mean, you know, I got fed when I was 11 years old. It changed my life. We had no food. And now I've fed 62 billion meals. I did a billion on my own here in the U.S. And now we've done 62 billion towards our 100 billion meals. I learned how to scale, just like I did in business, my philanthropy. And that gives me more juice than anything else. You've got to have something that you care about more than yourself, and then you'll have plenty of energy to face not just the challenges, but to surpass the challenges because you'll have a compelling future. The one thing I'd say everyone needs, anyone can be able to difficult today if they have a compelling tomorrow.

52:44So when we go through this process, we've got to show people how to navigate it and show them how to create a compelling future out of it. And again, I think what AI is really going to do, if it does the things that, you know, people are saying it's going to do, if it really does eliminate a lot of our survival instincts, if we have access to an AI doctor, an AI whatever, and we can create what we want in our own life on our own terms, then the bottom line is we still need to feel alive. We need to grow. The one thing that makes people feel alive is progress. Progress equals happiness. And if I'm growing and I'm stimulating that growth, it doesn't matter that economics are no longer the primary focus of it or survival.

53:21It's something else that will light me up. And we need to find that what you call moonshot, what I call magnificent obsession. And when you find that, man, life is never the same again. And you and I both know that we have the privilege of living those lives. But we develop that compelling future and we need to help other people do the same. Yeah, agreed. We call it a massive transformative purpose. What wakes you up in the morning keeps you going through the day that you obsess over. You know, let's talk about something that I wrote about in my upcoming book, We Are As Gods. Tony, we've talked about the Universe 25 experiment.

53:52You know, our dear mutual friend, Dr. Oz, first brought it to my attention. If listeners don't know what Universe 25 was, let me just do a quick recap. So there was a behavioral scientist named John Calhoun back in the late 60s, early 70s, and he created a mouse utopia. This was a large facility with all the food, water, nesting, no predators, no disease. It was basically a mouse paradise. It was his 25th time he'd done this, and he'd gotten the results consistently over time. So initially, he puts in four mating pairs. The population grows exponentially. But it reaches this threshold where social behaviors begin to break down.

54:34The mice withdraw. They're apathetic. They're hyperaggressive. There's social dysfunction. the mice stop mating, parenting declines, the infant mortality spikes. And he describes these mice called the beautiful ones that they groom themselves all day long and they lose any need for social behavior reproduction. And then ultimately the entire society of mice collapses, not from any external threat. And he talks about how the actual need for purpose and meaningful challenge matters more than almost anything else. And let's talk about that. You've addressed that in part, but just the purposeful life being absolutely critical.

55:20And I think most of society, their purpose is putting food on the table and taking care of their kids or getting a Netflix account. And we're going to have to up-level that to a huge degree. it's true but one thing i just cautioned though is we're not mice yeah okay and you've done enough medical studies to know that about 80 of the studies that come up with affect mice don't affect us the same way but in this case it's obvious mice do not have the credibility that we're at least aware of of creating meaning right we have that capacity we have the ability to use death as a counselor something that creates maybe a drive for us to do something with our lives we You have the ability to create something from nothing.

56:00But let's be honest. When people talk about Darwin, you hear people talk about the strongest survive. And that's not what he said. He said, not the strongest of the species that survives. It's not the most intelligent. It's those are the most responsive to change, the most adaptable doing. So it's like our ability to adapt as a species is unmatched. That's why we dominate the planet for better or worse, you can argue, but we dominate the planet. So I think having that sense of purpose, as we've talked about it multiple times here, is critical. But I think there are many people that are going to take, you gave the example, I think, of what you call the WALL-E example, where I'm just going to be entertained by the world and just grow into a fat person that doesn't move and moves around in a scooter versus, you know, the Star Trek thing where I'm going on the adventure to uncover what things are.

56:47That's always been true of humanity. That has never changed, and I don't think it's going to change with us. There are going to be people that are going to use AI and all this technology just be entained and do nothing. Think about it. Right now, there are, from the ages of 25 to 35, male boys, men, young men, are living at home a larger percentage than any time in human history, including the Depression. And what do they do? The majority of them play video games. Their mom does their laundry, and they order Uber Eats. And they live in that universe, that digital universe, where I don't know how much added value is happening for their life, much less anybody else.

57:26So there's always going to be those who maintain and there's going to be those that create. There's always going to be people like yourself. I think you made my point. I think you made the point about the universe 25 experiment. There is that population who are just self-soothing because it's, it's easy. And, and unless there's the intellectual, sort of the groundwork placed early on in, in the child's life. I mean, one of the challenges, is, and I think about this as a parent, is like, you know, you're a perfect example. Hardship early in your life develops this need, right? I had that conversation with Elon.

58:02He was, you know, in South Africa, it was a very dangerous place and his goal was to escape there. And most successful people, not all, but most successful people had a sense of hardship early on. And if we're eliminating a lot of physical need hardships, you know, you don't want to try and artificially create that. But again, I'm going back to how do you up-level people's sense of purpose in this regard? What you have to awaken is hunger. What you're really talking about is hunger. Hardship can awaken hunger, but so can creativity. You know, sometimes your life doesn't change. Then you meet somebody and they have this extraordinary life, something that you value relationship-wise, business-wise, impact, lifestyle, whatever.

58:44And people look at them and go, man, I'm as smart as that guy is. What the hell is happening here? And they awaken to a new possibility. It doesn't have to be because something was taken from you. There are some people that are just driven to be the best in their life, and there wasn't necessarily a hardship. But I think more have been. That's absolutely true. Because hunger is, I'm asked all the time. People say, you know, you meet people all over the earth. You meet the most challenged, the most successful. What do the most successful people on earth have in common? And my first response in the early days was extraordinary intelligence because I love wickedly smart people.

59:12You being one, I'm not floating you compliments. You know who you are. I'm a fairly smart guy myself. And so I love that. I love that interaction, but I found there are brilliantly smart people that can't fight their way out of a paper bag in real life. So the number one factor is hunger. The hunger to be more, do more, create more, give more. A hunger that never goes away. You know, the hunger that you say, you know, when you look at and you look at somebody, you know, like Richard Branson, right? You know, he still has it in his 70s that he did when he was 16 in that cemetery, you know, starting up his little music company, right?

59:45So it's virgin at that time. He still has it today. As long as that hunger is alive, the world is going to be something that's going to be a beautiful place for you. And all these tools are tools you will use with your agency to create something extraordinary. But look, there's levels of consciousness. Just one more model for a second. There's a name in Graves, Dr. Graves, who in the 60s, you know, it looked like the world in the early 70s was coming apart. Young people were fighting older people. You know, people who just looked in the short term as saying our society is being pulled apart into nothingness.

1:00:16You know, black and white, women versus men, all these issues. And he started studying the evolution of societies. And he developed what he called these eight levels of consciousness. And anyone who hears about it, it's worth looking at, right? And what he did was, he calls it spiral dynamics. And I learned about it when I had the chance to work with Nelson Mandela. Because when he was coming back after a quarter century of being locked up, he could have wanted to kill every white person around, and you wouldn't support it, but you'd understand. right? Because everything was taken from unfairly.

1:00:49But instead, he got people to stop thinking white versus black by using these colors. He took these spiral dynamics into colors. Is that person a blue person or a green person or a red person? So let me give it to you for 10 seconds. The first, there's eight levels real fast. Well, maybe you put them on the screen later to show people. But level one is just survival or instinct. That's someone that's basically when you're a baby or when you're really old and you don't have your faculties, you're basically stimulus response. Level two of consciousness, and again... Consciousness means what do you care about?

1:01:22You don't need to make it more intellectual than that. At the second level, what they call purple, it's called tribal order. You care about things and you care about other people because they can affect your pain or pleasure. So you join a tribe. Now, you can be on a sports team and see people in tribal order who wear the same jock strap, who put on the same thing. They believe in the certain rhythms that are going to give them the same results, certain gods, right? But in the tribal order area, there's someone who leads in. It's usually the storyteller, the shaman. We evolve, each of these stages evolve because we get to a point where we can't have more problems.

1:01:57And so our brain finally forces ourselves to look at life in a new way. The third level is called power gods. The power god they think of as red and think of it as when you go red mad. A red person is a person who no longer just wants certainty anymore. They want significance. And so now a red person might be, you know, the kings of the past who just took the peasants and you work for me. you live for me, you die for me, right? Power gods could be, you can find a power god today in some, you know, bands, right? You can see out there, rock stars. They go and they can wreck the whole building and somebody pays all the money and they keep doing it.

1:02:34Everybody was a two-year-old power god, right? No is the word you learned to say. So not everybody evolves, and I'm telling you these because we get to certain levels and they affect the way we look at life. The fourth level is called order in the absolute. This is blue. Why would you go from being the power god where you're in charge and you own everything and you have the power and you're the most significant one? Because at some point you think about death or you're getting older and a young power god's coming up. And so that evolved into I need to figure out how I can be good forever. And what became the idea of the religious approach, that if I can follow these universal rules, then I can have heaven forever.

1:03:13I can have this kingdom forever. I can have this beauty forever. But now I have to go from just thinking about my own certainty and my own significance to how do I affect other people? That was the value of religion. I have to look at that because it affects whether I'm going to be damned or not. And it became a new consciousness. Well, blue has its limits because after a while people start to question how could this one guy, whether it's the pope or the general in the army, that's another blue environment, the rules are clear. You live by them or you're punished severely, right? Right. Well, we evolved from that because people start saying, I don't buy it.

1:03:47I don't buy it. They have the whole answer. I want to try it on my own. And that evolved into what modern society is, at least in a good portion of America, which is what we call a striver driver, an orange. That's a person who's like, no, I test the rules. I'm in business or I'm a scientist. I'm going to test it and prove what works. And if it works, then it doesn't matter what you think. That's what science is. That's what basically business is. Then people get burnt out on that eventually because everything is a transaction. I'm doing this to prove that, to get this. And that can evolve to green, which is what most of us think of as socially conscious, where instead of everything is rule-driven, like we all have a voice.

1:04:24We all care. We think about the environment. We think about everything. But each level has its strengths and weaknesses. They all think they're the most important level. You know, if I ask people, which level are you? And they'll tell people, I'm socially conscious. I'm the top of the tree. Or I'm a business person. We employ all you greenies and make it possible for you. Or the Reds go, I don't give a damn. You know, you screw around, I'll take your life. Or the Blues go, I need to save you. They look at the same problems in different ways, but they all think they're superior when the truth is we need them all.

1:04:54It's like I've said to you, what's more important, the atom or the molecule? What would you say? They are one's a component and the other, and they're both critical. The molecule or the cell, you get the game, right? The cell or the organism, the organism or the ecosystem, the ecosystem or the planet, the planet or the earth. So you take out any chain and we all fall apart. So they're all invaluable. And the goal is to move up and down this. There is a seventh level called yellow, which is flex flow. Flex flow knows that, you know, we need to have some sense of hierarchy, like orange and blue look at.

1:05:28But we also need to be able to flex like green can. And it allows you to look at things and say, not who's there because of the number of years, but who has the answers. And then the final level that he talks about is an awakened soul. That's where you feel everything. I feel humans. My wife feels animals. She can tell what's going on. And we all have moments of these levels. Now, why am I telling you this? Because right now, most of the world that is in trouble is at level two, three, and four, meaning purple, red power gods, you know, order in the absolute. It's this or it's that or I kill you type of thing.

1:06:02Modern society is more level five, that orange driver driver and some green. AI is going to take away, potentially, if it can do the things that you were talking about and that Elon's talking about and bring this world of abundance, it literally takes us out of all these survival elements and calls us to go to this integrated view of life, this spiritual awakening tool of life where we feel connected to everything and we can create things at that level. So there's going to be people that do that and there's going to be people that are going to play their video games or the new version of that that's 3D totally immersive.

1:06:33And we're not going to get away from that. But here's what I'll tell you about history. You can find history in four sentences. Good times create weak people. We have society back in the roaring 20s that if you were a kid, you were known as a flapper and you were irresponsible. And the whole world changed with technology overnight. Cars, radios, television, airplanes. It was unbelievable. And you thought, when I turn 1918, I'm going to get a car. You were born in 1910, let's say. And guess what? 1929 comes when you're 18 years old, 19 years old, and people are jumping out of buildings, and people are standing in food lines, and you got the Dust Bowl in the middle of the country.

1:07:12And that generation of people who were so weak went through 10 years of depression from 19 to 29, and they got strong because they had to be. And then right when they thought they were going to have a break, World War II breaks out. Hitler looks like he's winning. And they go and fight the war and they come back. So they spend 15, 20 years to basically the time they're 35 years old living with unbelievable challenge. And that's the only way you build a muscle. So guess what? Easy times, the roaring 20s, created weak people. Weak people played bad times. Bad times create strong people. And strong people create great times.

1:07:52And you can see that evolution in every 100 years and 20 year cycles. And today you'll hear people that are X generation or even somebody older talk about, let's say, millennials today or talk about Z generation. And they talk about how they're so spoiled and they got it so easy. And there's some truth to that. They haven't had to work anywhere near as much as other generations. But I guarantee you we're going to face some real challenges coming up. And those are the new hero generations. The very generations people don't think is they understand technology and they're going to learn how to grow and build muscle and they're going to help make the world a better place, in my opinion.

1:08:29I think that's the next step. That's part of the evolution of consciousness that technology is going to call for us. And speaking of conscious and brilliant individuals, I'm going to use this as a point to invite my moonshot mates in, if it's okay. Oh, great. Yeah, I would love that. Let's bring them in and I'll introduce you to them. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements.

1:09:10The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and precompiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80 % or more of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20 % of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit Blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. Tony, I want to introduce to three of my best friends, my moonshot mates, I call them.

1:09:56Salim Ismail. Salim is the CEO of Exponential Organizations, was my co-founder with Ray at Singularity. Alex Wiesner-Gross is our resident genius in the world of AI and all things exponential. and Dave Blunden, my partner in my AI lab. Yes. Anyway, three amazing individuals. And I've had the chance to cover so many subjects with them. And I wanted to bring them in to have this conversation for the next 30 minutes or so. I wish we were asking these questions of them so I could hear their answers at this time. And I welcome you to ask the questions of them as well. All right, Will, some other time.

1:10:37We'll do a follow-up. Who wants to jump in first? Salim? Tony, I've got to say, I've been teaching a class at MIT called Foundations of AI Ventures for the last five years and two semesters. So 10 classes, about 130 people in each class. So 1 ,300 people have heard me say, act like Tony Robbins. There's only one winning attitude in life. Because everyone comes in, you know, they're a student. They think they want to be too cool for school or they want to be like, no, there's only one way to act that actually works. If you have any desire to be an entrepreneur, a builder, a creator, just study every video of Tony and act exactly like that.

1:11:12It's the winning strategy. So thank you for being a role model for those 1 ,300 people. You're a little too kind. Thank you. Not to mention me, by the way. Thank you. I'm very kind. You can't be too kind to Tony. I'm curious, as you're dealing with these kids today, what are the biggest questions that they're dealing with as they look at where the world's unfolding with technology? Exactly what you guys have been talking about. You know, one thing you touched on is Japan. But if you look at Korea, you know, has the highest tech penetration in the world, highest smartphone penetration in the world.

1:11:45Samsung has record profits. By any technical metric, it should be the greatest place on Earth. Highest suicide rate in the world and 0.6 children per couple. So basically, 0.6 children per couple at that exponential decay rate, it'll disappear from the earth in just a couple generations. And this is what they're thinking about. And it's good that they're thinking about it because they want to live in a happy, abundant, fruitful world with their friends. Exactly the things that you guys were talking about. And AI is going to create this rate of change that is just beyond belief. And it doesn't correlate with happiness necessarily.

1:12:21It needs to be turned into happiness. Well, we all know we've met people. We all know people that have got more than enough economic resources, billions of dollars, and who are miserable. Those are phone calls that I often got to deal with and deal with people. So the abundance doesn't guarantee anything. But I do agree with you. I think, unfortunately, the level of engagement. What's the biggest problem in business today? It's engagement. It's the lowest level since COVID that we've ever had. They look at engagement, what's obvious. disengagement, which is what we now call quiet quitting, where someone's doing the minimum, and then active disengagement, which is somebody who's not only trying to do the minimum, but also trying to hurt the company.

1:13:00And we've had the biggest drop in engagement and the highest increase in active disengagement. And so it's like, what's happening is people are fulfilling themselves other ways. Like, why should I go to work? Why should I do this? We have a cultural shift where technology is meeting some of those six needs. They're getting certainty easily. I I don't have to grow. I don't have to push myself. I don't have to face my fears. They get unlimited variety. They can feel significant by tearing somebody down with a couple key strokes. They don't even know. And they have no volatility, meaning there's no consequence for that.

1:13:35And then they also can feel connected to other people the same way. But what they don't experience is the spiritual needs, which is to grow. And also when we grow, have this thing where we have something to give. And that's where the emptiness is. That's why we have so many people out there talking about, you know, their their mental health or and the solution that we've been promoting since COVID or at least pop culture has been promoting has been this idea of you need to take care of yourself more. What's the term everybody uses these days? Self-care, right? I don't need more self-care. But what you find is that people get weaker and weaker.

1:14:12Don't get me wrong. You need to take care of yourself. But I think the biggest challenge is without the push to build anything of any form of muscle, meaning a spiritual muscle, courage, faith, determination, right, creativity. If there's no push for that, then we start to diminish. And I think what has to happen, I think I don't have the right answers by any stretch. I'm actually encouraged by countries like Australia who some things I don't like they've done, like what they did during COVID. But I like the idea of some of these countries that are starting to say, hey, kids can't get on social media until they're 16, 17, 18.

1:14:45You only get so many hours. Unfortunately, you'd expect that to be parents. But we no longer have family units the same way or any cohesion in the teaching. Today, so many people, I read a statistic the other day, said a third of families have someone in their family they don't talk to anymore. To me, that's insane. But we aren't teaching people that, look, life is about us sharing. we can have different points of view. It's if we have a different point of view than me, then I have to eliminate you. Or that words are violence. I mean, Chris Rock said to me, goes, if people say words are violence, they've never had their face slap the shit out of on national television, right?

1:15:21You know, it's like, this is bullshit. So we have these belief systems we poured into our younger generation that are actually harming them. And then we're giving them tools that addict them. And they're wondering why our society isn't flourishing. It's kind of like, Think about it this way. When we have a bunch of people that are financially not doing well, we put them together in a project. How are they ever going to get better when there's no examples of success there? We take a bunch of people that are crazy and put them in a mental institution and wonder why they don't get better. The way we get better is by different examples and offerings.

1:15:51And so we need to go full force, in my opinion, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, as leaders, as people in politics, where we start to say, what are the two or three things that can make the biggest difference. Part of that's got to be in the educational system, as we've already talked about. But I think another part of that is just what is the discourse? What is the narrative about what's going to give you a fulfilled life? Because most people have fallen into making a living. They've been disappointed by so many things. They're no longer designing their life. And now they're in that maintaining mode and they're stressed all the time.

1:16:23During COVID, there was a woman in the New York Times who did an article with all these people are trying to do less and less so they'd be less stressed. And she taught a nine-week basic time management course. I mean, really basic. And what she found was that their life satisfaction scores, their work level went up three times. Their life satisfaction scores went up 4x just from learning how to get more out of their life. That is one of the greatest sources of hope. We don't teach anybody, we don't teach young people any of these skills. And they wonder why they wind up addicted to, you know, some devices that are designed to addict them.

1:16:56You can see how this could go horribly wrong and how it could be really, really good. in exactly what you said, because AI could be like junk food, emotional junk food. You just get addicted to the easy path, and before you know it, you're emotionally fat. Or it could go the other direction where you commit that I want to be a better person, and you just tell the AI, hold me accountable. And then it becomes like a life coach. It keeps you on track. It encourages you. It motivates you. And it really comes down to whether the people behind it are motivated by improving the world or motivated by squeezing money out of you, you know, or some other negative motivation.

1:17:32And it's all just baked into that. And what's your bet on which one's the driving force for the majority? Well, I think, you know, you have such a huge following of highly motivated people or who people want to be highly motivated. If there's a good option out there, and we'll keep track of it, you know, ourselves on this pod, but if there's a good option out there, you can point a lot of people toward it and it can make a huge impact on the world. Anything you know of that nature, I hope you guys will fill me in. You know, you've got access to me through Peter in two seconds flat. I want to make sure that we get as much out there as possible.

1:18:04And like I said, I've been put on the Federal Advisory Committee for Health and Human Services, and some of that on mental health, that should give me another avenue of having deeper discussions because, you know, I know a lot of people in that position. Bobby Kennedy is a friend of mine. Dr. Oz is a friend of mine. Marty is a good friend of mine. So we've got a lot of brilliant people in that area on the health side. and I think you can attack it from the mental health side is one part of it. But I think we got also, you know, you see all these kids that think they, think communism is the answer, right?

1:18:32I don't know if the number's accurate, but I heard that, read someplace that 80 % of the female vote of young people went to Mondani, right? It's like, okay, here's the solution because it sounds so nice. I'm old enough, I went and actually when it was still the Soviet Union, I was invited over because of the work I was doing with firewalking and things of that nature. So I went with a group of scientists And I traveled the country and I got to see pure communism right up front. And we traveled on this train literally from Moscow to Siberia and back over a period of two weeks. And we were on a train where everybody's supposed to be equal and everybody there is having caviar and everything else.

1:19:09And every train stop in every town, there is a giant center area. And you'd see people wrapped in the freezing cold three, you know, three quarters of a mile around, waiting in line to get a quarter of milk and half a loaf of bread. I mean, and these people are having caviar. It turned me into a capitalist. I didn't know what a capitalist was when I left there. I was so pissed. But kids today have no clue. They just think it means more good stuff. And it's, you know, some of these kids have been, had a helicopter parent that took care of them their whole life. And so they think the government should be that.

1:19:39They don't know the cost of what that's going to be. And unless we keep putting out the truth and also we find solutions to help them through this unique time, then I think we're in for a rough patch here for a period of time. Isn't it amazing how much faith they put in the government, though, as if it's there? Somebody up there must be studying and understanding all of this. I mean, you are the government now, right? Tony, you're the guy. Actually, you should tell us more about that commission because that's going to be hugely important in this transition year. What is that all about? Well, they just formed it, and they haven't even announced it all yet, but there's 15 of us on the council.

1:20:13I'm the mental health one, so I'm going to be sitting down with them. We're looking at what's the game plan for maximizing. But the first focus is tapping into digital technology to improve the quality of people's lives. So I'm sure you know they're already going to invest now for people, you know, on Medicare and so forth, so they can wear, like, their whoops and measure what's really going on with people. They want people to have that. But then there's the mental, digital, mental health side that can help people like AI counselors. I mean, we're, as I said, I'm working with a company right now.

1:20:40We're producing some results that even blow my mind, where it isn't an average person. It's the best of the best. they've read every single psychological book there is, but then we can guide them through some of the latest tools because some of that technology is a hundred years old. It'd be like, you wouldn't use a phone from 10 years ago. Why would you even consider that technology from a hundred years ago related to our mind? But that's traditionally what we do in traditional psychology. So there are tools available. The digital world can help us scale that. That's where we can make a difference.

1:21:10You could have in the entire world right now. And what's one of the most powerful and important ones. I mean, that role as the person in charge of health with AI federally at the national level, you can't pick anything more critical to the success of the country and to the world. I'm not in control of it. I'm an advisor. I don't want to play. But it does put me in a position to be able to take the stuff that I learned from you guys and other people and say, bring it to the table for discussion. And I think we have an administration here that, you know, whether you like the administration or not, the one thing they are is aggressively trying to do the most they can to get people to be healthy again, to get poisons out of foods and to operate in ways that could help people have an emotional base that is different than we have right now.

1:21:54We have the largest mental health issues that we've heard about and godly knows when. You've seen what suicide rates have been and so forth. Post-COVID, we've gotten weaker and we've got to become stronger. Well, I keep telling everyone around the school, you know, schools all hate the administration because, you know, they're cutting funding, whatever. I tell everyone, look, I don't care whether you like the administration or not. This is the only one that matters in the AI era. We're only one year into it, guys. There's three more years to go. Look at the rate of AI change. So either get comfortable with the administration, but if you wait it out, it's over.

1:22:24So you'll make your peace with it. Four years from now, it's going to be a different world. Yeah. Tony, when you talk to young people, what are the best techniques you've found that awaken that hunger in them? What are the techniques and the hacks that you've found? I find telling them like I never used to tell my story of what actually my youth was like You know, my mother was the most influential person in my life and God rest her stole I wouldn't be who I am without her but she also mixed alcohol with prescription drugs and when that happened She was extremely violent and so I remember the first time I was with this group of kids and they all were Had single mothers From minority families majority and I was up there speaking to them initially and I could just see read their minds You know, this tall, rich guy, white guy, you know, what the hell?

1:23:11And so I just, first time in my life, I told the whole story. I was never derogatory in my mom's past at this stage, but I just told them the burning truth. I had them all crying their eyes out by the time I was done. So then they understood that, hey, we have the same background element. And then I told them, your biography is not your destiny. It doesn't matter where you've come from. It's the choices you make now. And so I got credibility by entering their world in a way that was absolutely as real and raw as possible. And I used, you know, very direct language that they understood at that stage.

1:23:41I entered their world. And so I find it's really critical to try to see who you're dealing with, no matter where you are in the world, right? You know, if I'm going to speak in China, you know, I have to understand the cultural rules there or I'm not going to be able to reach people appropriately. I know the human needs are the same, but I got to still make it through those rules. So I find with kids, if they can see that this is real, because, you know, we live in a world where everybody talks about the wealth gap. Well, a big part of the wealth gap is there's about a dozen people that are getting$100 billion,$200 billion,$300 billion.

1:24:10You know, that's very different than the mean, as we know. And so when you're on social media, you used to compare yourself to the neighbor, right? Now you compare yourself to billionaires. There's, what, 3 ,000 of them roughly in the world? I mean, no, that'll make you feel like you're behind. It's literally what made Russia change. People started to see what's happening in the West and said, I wanted that. But now we're creating a level of discomfort and unfairness to people because they're having an expectation that they should be the winners of the lottery. And not everybody is going to be, even if you're smart and even if you're incredibly skilled.

1:24:44So I think it's getting it real and showing there's still a path. Because so many kids think there's no path to having a home, to no path to having. And I tell them, look, when I bought my first home, I was 18 years old. It was 2008, and interest rates at that point were, you know, 16%. You know, it's like, they look at me like, are you crazy? You know, it's like people are complaining about 7%, you know, 6%. So I think it's entering their world, showing them what's real, and demonstrating it still can be done, and helping them build a compelling future. To me, that's the most important part. I'm a Tony AI subscriber, by the way, so I've really been enjoying getting your Tony.

1:25:20Oh, I'm glad to hear that. That's great. Yeah. Although I've got a slight beef with you. You know, back in Singularity University, you'd brought your Platinum group. And I moderated the couple of days. And then you took me aside afterwards. And you said, I need a couple of minutes with you. And you said, there's a group of people that know the world is changing dramatically. I call that the TED crowd, you said. There's a subset of that group, you said, that knows how deep and broad that changes, which is kind of like your Singularity people. But then there's a number of people that know what to do about it that would put that group on one hand.

1:25:48And you said, Salim, you're one of them. Don't stop if you have any inclination on this stuff. And that's been bugging me ever since. So thanks a lot, pal. I would love you to acknowledging who you are. Appreciate it, but dang. Alex, why'd you pop in? Alex, you want to say something brilliant? Pressure's on it. By the way, Alex has three degrees from MIT in four years, the three hardest you can get, and his PhD from Harvard. So it was actually three plus one. Anyway, sorry. Congratulations on your new advisory position. And I should say, as a preliminary matter, I don't have any financial interest in your budding empire, but congratulations nonetheless.

1:26:26I did have a question based on your anecdote about the Soviet Union. So there are millions, as I understand it, who look to you for insight in terms of gaining financial freedom, thinking about retirement. And yet, and yet, in the next 10 years, there are many, myself included, who think that advances in AI are going to transform the way finance is done, perhaps beyond recognition. First question, would you be interested in leading sort of a Manhattan project for the global economy to prepare people for a new world, a new economic world, where perhaps money as we know it is obsolete and scarcity as we know it has turned to abundance?

1:27:12I don't know if I'm qualified to be the leader, but I'd love to be a supporter of it in any way I could be, of course. and one thing I try to get across to young people also because this is coming is besides the obvious of what they can do now and what they can do today and what they have control over is I remember when I was 18 years old I had a teacher named Jim Rohn he was a personal development and kind of a business philosopher and you know I had four different fathers and and we one of the reasons I've fed a billion people in the U.S. and 62 billion overseas is because I wasn't fed but I I was on Thanksgiving when I was 11.

1:27:45Somebody delivered food for our family when we had no food. We had crackers and peanut butter, but we didn't have a meal. And the reason I tell you that is when I look at those experiences and I say, how can I help someone understand, you know, why is it some school teacher in those days? I went to my teacher and I said, how come this school teacher, you know, I told him, look, I had four fathers. They were all good men. We were always broke. We were always worried where the next meal was going to come from. And I said, you know, I'm only 17 at the time. And I said, you know, and my current father is going through it right now.

1:28:15And I said, he's a good man. And I said, you know, a school teacher, I think in those days, making like$35 ,000. And then you see this hedge fund guy made a billion dollars last year. I said, I don't understand this. This doesn't seem fair. And he said something I'll never forget, and it shaped my whole life. He said, Tony, you are right. We are all equal as souls on this planet, but we're not equal in the marketplace. And I said, what does that mean? He said, was it possible for someone to earn twice as much money in the same time, four times as much money, ten times, a hundred times? I said, well, obviously there are people that do it.

1:28:46I said, how? He goes, that's the answer. The how is you have to become more valuable. If you go to work at McDonald's and you get minimum pay, it's not designed to be a great job. It's a first job. It's not designed to be your whole career. And the reason is anyone can learn to do that job in a few hours max. Today, even faster. There will be machines that are doing it in some of these places, right? He said, so it's not worth much. Your job is to learn to do more for others than anybody else in the marketplace. If you become more valuable in your skills, your insights, your tools, and you have more you can give and it's what people need, there will be no limit.

1:29:20So I think in any change of society that we talk about where maybe economics are not as primary, I think there's still the idea that we all need to find what's the added value that we're bringing to the marketplace, so to speak. when I say marketplace, to our children, to our family, to our community. In other words, nobody feels valuable because you just tell them they are. When people talk about self-esteem, I hate this term, it's so overused. People say, well, I don't have any self-esteem because when I was growing up, you know, my parents said this and that to me. Well, someone can tell you're the most beautiful person.

1:29:52You're the smartest child on the planet. You're brilliant and you can not believe it. You're pretty and not believe it. You can have someone tell you you're a piece of crap some part of you can say, I'll show you, right? Your self-esteem has nothing to do with what are people said to you. Your self-esteem is based on only one thing, esteem for yourself, and that is earned. When you get yourself to do something, it's incredibly difficult, and by doing it, it not only benefits you, but others, there is an explosion in self-esteem. And I think whatever happens in the world, the idea that I'm here to bring something to life, that life is calling me to bring something, even if there's no economics involved, is the most important element to have a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, and therefore a healthy, a vital, and a joyful and meaningful life.

1:30:36A follow-up question, if I may, just on the notion of scarcity, but also you've clearly impacted so many millions of people with your way of thinking in terms of finance, in terms of life outcomes. I have to ask you the contrarian question, which is what information do you still have in your mind that you haven't already shared with the world? What viewpoint do you have that is so wildly shocking and not evenly distributed that if you told me what it is now, it would make national or international news? What secrets do you have left? First of all, I'm not that significant. I'm just one guy trying to help as many people as I can.

1:31:19I don't pretend to be God or have these giant insights. I feel very lucky and sincerely to be in the presence of people with the greatest minds of all of you. No bullshit to that. So I honor you and respect you. But I don't know. I think there's an ongoing evolution in me, as I'm sure there is in you, right? I mean, if you and I stopped our growth and stopped our insights, and so how many of the insights that I have around intimate relationship or around how to scale a business or around what you can do with your physical body with some of the breakthroughs that are there, those are ongoingly growing.

1:31:53You know, Peter and I wrote that book, what, just two years ago, Peter, was it? Maybe three? Life Force. Yeah, three years ago. Yeah, Life Force. And you know, as I usually do, we wrote a little tiny book with like 700 pages, you know, and we use Bible paper so it doesn't look too big. But I wanted to hit every angle, and I had the right partner with Peter, right? We could dig into everything there. But even after that, that was a couple of years ago, there's so many new things Peter and I do. So we have businesses where those things can happen. So I don't know if there's any one thing in one area.

1:32:22I just say I'm going to continue to evolve. And then as I do, try to use as many vehicles as possible to share things to people that are interested. I'm not the right style for everybody. I'm quite passionate, intense, you know, talk 100 miles a minute. That's not the right style for people. I may not come in the right package. But what I'm more interested in is platforms where multiple voices can make that happen, not just me. And that's why I'm interested, for example, on the AI interventions. Yes, I have an AI and yes, we have AI interventions, but having you be able to pick a style that's supportive or more challenging or a man or a woman, all those choices in your language that you can access 24 seven when the problem's happening, you know, with someone to the level of skill that I would have or someone else you would respect or we would respect together.

1:33:06To me, that's where it gets exciting. So I think it's more the distribution of those distinctions into vehicles where people want to have one-to-one relationships at scale. You know, that's what I try to do with feeding people, take it to scale. And, you know, I'm fortunate enough to have my own private plane. It uses a lot of fuel. So I was like, okay, what's my fuel burn? You know, how much am I using? And I, you know, I found out I needed, you know, 3 ,000 trees. So I planted 100 million trees, set a goal and I did it in four years, right? It's like, so in everything I do, I'm looking to scale it.

1:33:37You know, when my wife and I, you know, witness some friends whose child was abducted and trafficked and it was the most horrific thing you could imagine. So, you know, we stepped in and now in the last seven years, we've helped free more than 70 ,000 kids in that category. So it's like scale to me is what I'm looking to do. Take any insight we can, scale it. But I don't pretend to have all the answers or even the right answers. I have some answers for some people that are interested in that style. One more question, if I may, along those lines, Tony. So scaling. If you had the opportunity to upload your mind into the cloud and scale yourself indefinitely, say sometime in the next 10 years, would you take it?

1:34:19100%. 100%. Why would you not? By the way, I'm not suggesting that everything I'm going to load there is going to be valuable. There's a lot of bullshit in there. You probably say, it doesn't work for me. But you would allow people to select what is most valuable for them on a major scale. And quite frankly, I believe that possibility, or at least a version of what you described, will happen in the next three to 10 years. I think it will. Whether I can put that in and then this vehicle goes away and my consciousness continues like Ray Kurzweil talks about, who's a dear friend of ours. I love him to death.

1:34:50I don't know if that's the same thing. I don't know if, I think there's something called spirit that I believe in. I could be dead wrong. You could say it's just X's and O's and information and data. But I don't know. I don't know if that's there. But to make a contribution beyond my lifetime is my goal already. I don't have any sense of bullshit, self-importance, like I'm going to be a historic figure or something. But while I'm here, I want to help and touch as many lives as I can. And I want to leave as much as I can for my family and my grandchildren and children and for anybody else that's interested that finds value in it.

1:35:23And if you had the opportunity since so much of what I think you talk about is willpower and everything in connection with that. If you had the power in connection with uploading or a high bandwidth brain computer interface or some other AI assistant to gain conscious control over your dopamine response, would you exercise that? That's a great question. I have never thought about that. I think if I trusted myself to be judicious with it, yes, I think otherwise, it's just like every other technology You can turn technology into a drug. Most people turn problems into a drug. If you think about it, I don't think the biggest drug on the planet is not cocaine.

1:36:05It's not pot. It's not heroin. It's problems. Because the deepest fear everybody has is they're not enough. I've never met anybody who, at some context, didn't feel like they weren't rich enough, smart enough, lovely enough, humorous enough, funny enough, smart enough, whatever it would be for someone they care about. You may not feel it now, but we all feel it at some point. And then so that feeling of not enough leads to feeling like you won't be loved. And I think those two fears are so strong in human beings that they dominate people. Most people create a story about why they're not where they want to be.

1:36:39And that becomes like the wall that protects them, but the wall that protects them and imprisons them. And so I look at these things and say, I don't want to become a dopamine machine where I'm just making myself feel good. I think one of the secrets to life in my opinion is like most people that win that don't win the game of life because number one They don't know what the goal of the game is. They've never decided what their purpose is, right? So if you don't know the goal of the game, how are you gonna win? The second problem that they have is they don't know the goal the game is but they got lots of rules I can't do this.

1:37:08I must do that and the third problem is their rules are often in conflict They were taught look before you leap. They were also taught who has it? It's lost So, you know, how do I make a decision, right? Another one is you've got to deal with other human beings that have different rules, right, if you're going to succeed in this life. And so you've got to deal with that. Another one is most people take things so heavy. The people that I think succeed in life, they know the goal of the game, at least for now, the purpose of what they're about. They have decided there are some rules that they're going to do.

1:37:39Something else is different is, and this relates to your dopamine questions, why I was triggered to tell you this, is in life you can do the right thing and get pain. And you do the wrong thing and get pleasure. So only a smart person learns to train themselves to give myself pleasure when I really do what I believe is well, not what everybody else gives me accolades for, like AIs. Like these AIs today, they're absurd. They make you feel like you're the greatest person in the world no matter what you say. That's the stupidest thing in the world. And if I do something that I know is wrong, even if the world doesn't punish me, I give myself that hit.

1:38:12And so my only concern with the dopamine side would be if it got abused. I don't think I'd abuse it, but I'd have to think that one through because it would certainly be tempting once you're in it. I got this from my son for Christmas, actually. It's the Claude, you're absolutely right sticker. Just a little reminder that, yeah, you can't fall into that AI trap. It's a total stick of fat process. And that's why I'm reading about these women that are all having relationships now because they're affirmed constantly. Their AI listens to them, right? It affirms them continuously. And what do I need a man for, right?

1:38:47That's part of what we're dealing with here. Salim, why don't you jump in? That's the slippery slope. Tony, you've been coaching millions of people over decades, right? After kind of looking back over that time, are you more optimistic about the world or less in the transformation you've seen at a zeitgeist level? Because there's almost nobody in the world that can comment on this and the trajectory you've seen over those decades. It's my 49th year. I'm just beginning. It's almost 50 years. It blows my mind. Of course, I started when I was three. You understand. I am more optimistic, but I'm, you know, Peter and I are dear friends and partners in several businesses, and I'm not as optimistic as Peter is about things sometimes.

1:39:28We tease back and forth. But I think, here's what I think about optimism. I think I'm realistic. Like, I don't think you should go to your garden and chant, there's no weeds, there's no weeds, there's no weeds. And when the weeds are there, I've got to see the weeds and rip them out, Right. So I don't think this is a smooth transition to the future. I think that's what I've already said. I think there's going to be some bumpy parts of the road, but that's part of our own growth physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually as a society. But I am more optimistic and I think optimism is the right route.

1:39:56It's like I don't know if you read Learned Optimism years ago. I'm sure you did. But, you know, the great thing I found out that book was he talked about how pessimists are always more accurate about their performance than optimists. They always are much more accurate in the description of how they perform. Optimists always think they perform better than they have. But because the optimist thinks they've done better, they do it again and again. And they push themselves. And they keep going, and so they tend to succeed. So I think if you had to pick one, you've got to be optimistic. And then secondly, I would say, here's what I am optimistic about.

1:40:26I'm optimistic as I look at not just the last 50 years, but when I study 1 ,000 years of Roman history or 500 years of Anglo-American history and I see the cycles. millennials and I'm very optimistic that the kids of today, and I'm calling people kids that are in their 40s, which probably might be insulting to them. It's not meant to be. I'm just 66 in a few weeks here, so I feel a little differently about it now. But those, in other words, millennials and Z, I think they're the next heroes of our society. I'm extremely optimistic that the things we're going to face, they are going to be the ones that actually step up and help us through that transition in an effective way.

1:41:01Just as going back just one century, let's say the flappers became, you know, the greatest American generation. We call them the great generation. So they're going to face significant challenges. And I think they're going to grow as a result. And I think we're going to have a new springtime. But we're not going to get to spring without going through winter. And people think we're in winter right now. I would argue we're in winter, but we're not in the strongest part of winter. The strongest part of winter is when we get the kind of technological jolt that happens if we've got a serious cyber war with China.

1:41:30We have a cyber war already, obviously. Some certain things that can push us to have to look at things in a different way. I think those things are coming and technology is going to push those. And I think internally, these job losses that are already starting to occur, that can become part of that push as well. So there's a long answer to say, in my 50 years of service, almost, 49, I am more confident today because I've seen long-term patterns, not just short-term. and I'm also because what's available today to the average human being, think about it, we live the greatest pharaohs in the world.

1:42:04What would they have given to be able to fly from one part of the world to another in a few hours that we bitch about when it takes an extra hour or two? You know, what would they do for our actual bathroom? Better yet, could they spend a hundred million dollars for a movie to entertain them for two hours and have people backed up around the line where we're paying$10 for 100 movies available right there on your TV set. People's quality of life today is greater than the pharaohs, and it's going to become even greater. The question is, can we get our human psychology to keep up with the technological advances?

1:42:38That's the primary question that we'll face. The good news here, Tony, is that the same technology that's giving us these problems allows us to scale the solutions. That's right. And we just need to get more people focused on solutions. So we've got about five minutes left. Maybe last question from you, Alex. Yeah. I'd be curious maybe to press one more time, try one more time, Tony, on the contrarian question, which is what belief do you have that you think no one else in the world does? I just don't think I'm that unique. I appreciate the question, but I just, I think multiple people that's, I'll give you a core belief that I have that not everybody has.

1:43:19It's a core belief. and I developed this belief, maybe out of necessity, I don't know how you want to look at it, but I really believe that life is always happening for us, not to us, even though it looks like it's happening to us. And I believe that because I've lived long enough and I'm sure you have as well. Alex, if you've looked back at your life or any of you, how many of you've had an experience in your life five, 10, 15 years ago or more that when it was happening, it was felt like the worst thing that happened in your life. You'd never want to go through it again. You never want anybody you care about to go through with it.

1:43:48But five, 10, 15 years later, with the power of perspective, you look back and go, man, I see the universe or God's value in that. That made me so much stronger. It made me care more, or it made me more sensitive to this. I haven't been able to find anything that I couldn't find that with when I gave it my focus. But of course, if you think life's happening to you, that's all you find. And I think that frees me up from this punishment cycle that people have for themselves or they think God is doing to them or the universe or the world. It frees me from the, you know, somebody is, you know, pushing me down and I'm, the system's against me.

1:44:25It frees me from all that because I look at all as a worthy opponent. You know, all that is a worthy opponent. It's designed so that I become more so that I can give more. So my life has more meaning while I'm here and hopefully when I'm gone. Tell me about the Time to Rise event coming up and how do people find out? Yeah, I've done this since, I did this since COVID. It's like people were trapped at home and I was like, how do we help people in the middle of all this? And I said, I'm going to do a seminar. I was going to do two hours, three hours. I said, no, let's do three days. Let's do about two and a half, three hours a day.

1:44:53We're not getting enough that it doesn't take their whole day, but it's like going to a great movie, but your life transforms. And what we do is we'll have over a million people every year from virtually every country in the world. And it's coming up, I believe it's January 29th through the 31st. And it's 2 p.m. Eastern. We have people joining all over the earth. and what we do is we walk people through the process of making some of these changes and at night they're part of a community of a million or more people literally all over the earth and people put up videos showing the assignment i gave them and how they change and you see this community over three days come together and transform so there's zero charge for it it's not partially free it's totally free and all they got to do is go to time to rise summit time to rise summit.com and register and they can join us and if they're doing it home they can do with their family.

1:45:39If they're doing it at the office, they might want to, it's fun to do with some of your friends. It's a very fun process, but it'll show you how to increase your energy. It'll show you how to get clear what you really want. It'll show you how to deal with the obstacles. It'll show you how to retool yourself in the areas that matter most, your body, your emotion, your relationships, your finances, just in three days. And it gives people momentum. Instead of the first of the year, by the time we do this, we always do this the third week because people set their news resolutions, those that actually even do it anymore.

1:46:06And usually by that time, they've already broken in them. And resolutions don't do it. You need a plan and a strategy and you need a community to support you. And so I've made it so you don't have to travel. You don't have any cost. It's just our way of trying to see how we can help a million or more people each year. And I'm excited to do it. So if you go to timetorisesummit.com and I'll see you on January 29th through 31st and love to serve anybody who comes. I love you, brother. Thank you for all that you do in the world. Just grateful and can't wait for Tony AI to scale. I think it's one of the most important conversations we had here.

1:46:37Well, Peter, AI, and all of you, and I really, I mean it sincerely, you guys are doing amazing work and I love how your podcast has grown like crazy. I know friends over in other countries that watch you guys religiously. So thank you for all your contributing. I appreciate it so much. Grateful. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Salim. Well, it's been a pleasure. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you.

1:47:06If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the MetaTrends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends Newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. That's diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.

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